Oh, yeah, I had a blast playing Orpheus. My character was named Ramona, but everyone called her Rabies. She was a Hue and a Wisp, and she was honestly one of the most fun characters I have ever played. What did you play in your game?
Ah, that makes sense. It's just Dark and Edgy so it gets brought up a lot? God, I really want to play this now. Ms. Book in the intro gives me all kinds of feels, and internet identities are an awesome idea. And, I mean, does a Cover have to be a physical human body? It's just about convincing the world that you "exist", and that bears some interesting similarities to internet-based identity theft as we know it now. Or could a demon do the Quirrell thing and timeshare a body/life? So many interesting possibilities.
I never actually got to play it. I got nominated as Storyteller because I was so excited about the whole thing. Actually there's a funny story about that. I could probably run the first three or four nights in my sleep now because I've done the opening to it three times now with three mostly-but-not-completely different sets of players. But every time the players got through the first bit (not even moving to the plot bit at the start of the second book, everything still based in first book style get-mission-do-mission-bond-with-team stuff), something would happen that broke up the game. The first time I tried to run it, a couple of the players suddenly had to move and wouldn't be able to play anymore, and we were all kind of bummed out after that and no one wanted to play anymore. The second time, I tried to run it over skype, but my computer (which was pretty ancient) had finally had enough and both the hard drive and the motherboard died. The third time, when we got to about that same damn point in the game, one of my friends quite suddenly got arrested for stealing an expensive laptop from another student at his community college. After that I decided I was never going to play or run Orpheus again.
It's apparently one of the big Things that people were looking for when Demon was in prroduction, too. Personally I like the concept of small pacts better. And it doesn't, it just is usually because some of the others get kind of difficult to wrangle. There's one of the abilities in the expansion book that lets you be a house, iirc.
........ o_o I WANNA BE A HOUSE. I mean. Heh. Continuing to read! I do kind of love the idea of small pacts; this is some interesting "deal with the devil" interpretation. :D I really like D:tD more than I thought I would based on the quickstart.
Good. GOOD. And yeah the quickstart is a little meh, which I personally blame on the pregenerated characters. As concepts go a lot of them are just... eeeeeeh to me.
Yeah, the characters were a little meh, and iirc, the plot was a "characters are clueless and fumble around until they find something" plot, which usually rubs me the wrong way. I've spent too much time fumbling around in the dark, trying to find the One Super Important Clue that unravels the mystery; makes me feel silly and reactive. I enjoy hypercompetency and Thirty Xanatos Pileups, that's part of why spy themes make me happy.
Yeah, definitely, though to be fair it's kind of hard to get that layer of complexity in a session or two. #I should work on that for Promedemon #though it's mostly a discovery plot #I have the general arc but I need to figure out Actual Clues
I've always been disappointed with those quickstarts, largely because of that "Clueless character" syndrome. And how they always seem to be looking for some kind of magic maguffin clue or that ONE PIECE OF INFORMATION. Don't do that to the players; if they aren't interested in that one thread, or fail a roll, or track down something else, drop other hints, other clues, other foreshadowing. Your story should be able to work with your characters even if they don't quite do what you expect.
This this this. And it's more fun when the characters want things, imo, and aren't just wandering or being thrust into situations. Character goals and proactive action are almost never present in preset scenarios, and I get how that would be hard to write but... it kinda bugs me. :\
Everybody hold the phones. The Changeling: the Dreaming 20th anniversary Kickstarter is coming soon. I am too hype for exclamation points. I am too hype for anything but hype.
I HAVE NEVER PLAYED oCHANGELING BUT I AM HYPE BECAUSE i have to say i felt a bit betrayed when I was looking up wikis and shit and i got excited over nchangeling only to learn it wasn't quite as fairytail and dreams as the old one. *SIGHS* I'M SORRY I LOVE CHANGELINGS AND FAE AND DREAMING STUFF AND I COULD REBUILD NONO AS AN RPG CHARACTER AHHHHHHH
I have a friend who swears by oChangeling but I never really felt it as intensely as nChangeling, myself. Which again, see previous comments wrt nChangeling being the abuse-and-trauma survivor game.
... Now I kind of want to see a fusion. I mean, fairytales deal with some pretty dark psychological stuff too.
There's some pretty solid fairytale base stuff you can throw into nChangeling in the expansion books, especially the antagonists. there's a good bit of world building or characters that are based on fairy tale archetypes. My LARP group is in talks for a nChangling game; rule being that everyone's character has to be based on some kind of fairy tale trope or archetype. It's going to be great if it gets off the ground!
So I dunno if anyone else has an interest in Beast: the Primordial, but. There's an ask thread going on at RPGnet and it's. super intriguing.
... ooo. That does sound neat; haven't read through too much, but... I've really been enjoying the 'limited' settings in nWoD, I never got into Angsty Vampires, but they're doing some really interesting exploration of the nature of humanity. (I've been slowly reading Werewolf: The Apocalypse too, and wow, it's so much less focused on moral ambiguity and the nature of humanity.)
Yeah, I much prefer most of the limited run settings. Plus I find the Big Three kind of hard to do crossover AUs with, personally; except for Mage which is kind of getting its hand in every pot (though not as much as Beast will be, HELLO crossovergame), Vampire and Werewolf feel much more limited to me than a lot of the limited lines do, ironically enough. Like, you can turn anything "humans against the world" into a Hunter game, and pretty much any "looks human but not" into Demon or Changeling, depending on if it's a magical or technological kind of Faking Human. Vampires? With a few exceptions that were especially designed to invoke vampires without being vampires, the only thing you can turn into Vampire is vampires. (Vampires is starting to look like not a word.) Even if you do choose to have vampires in your game, Anything Dead can get shoved into Geist fairly easily. The typical vampire plot of "oh no, I'm a monster now" is just really played out to me (also: more interesting in Changeling) and most of the other ~dark themes~ you can imitate just fine with one of the other WoDs. (Usually Changeling.)
I would like to point out here that, while not in fact the P&P mood probably, LARP Vampire has a fair share of 'Hell YES I'm a monster now' so you can definitly get the plot to be enthusiastic about it. Also we are rebooting our LARP game. Vampire socialism is a thing I hav enever thought as accutely about as right now. Also Vampire gender theory, which I am writing, because I am the one in the group who is studying Gender. Creys.
